Did you know you could make millions on auto pilot with a Tsunami of awesome traffic bots waiting to send an avalanche of traffic to your blog which will convert into piles of cash whilst you sleep?

You have probably come across offers such as the above if you spend anytime at all learning to make money online. You probably are well aware that products sold in such a way are complete garbage and rely on psychological tricks to get you to part with your cash rather than providing a product that will actually make you money and teach solutions that can be easily implemented.

One of the hardest things about being a noob is being able to tell the charlatans from the Voodoo High Priests of making a crust online. Fortunately, you are in the right place at the right time if you are looking not only to make money online, but also build a long term successful business.

If you are new to the world of SEO, web marketing, latent semantic indexing, etc. go and sign up for the 30 Day Challenge.

First, it’s completely free. Other such courses will charge you literally thousands of dollars, take advantage of it and learn some very tasty stuff, I did.

Third, info is given to you as if on a bed of buttered lobster, slipping into your sub-conscious and feeding deep into your brain. High calorific, informational morsels are offered to you free, every day for 30 days.

My advice, get fat on the info and burn it off through implementation.

I have to confess, although I use my own training programme to inculcate my new team members into the dark arts. I do also get them to do a 30 day challenge. Why? Because it’s very high quality training and the teaching method works, and it’s free.

I also watch the videos each time they come out, even though I am aware of most of the knowledge that is imparted, it helps to see things through fresh eyes again. I’ve been successful in my career thus far, but success can be dangerous, it makes you complacent, arrogant, lazy. All of which I admit to being. And you need to revisit the well and drink some reality juice on a regular basis to sharpen that edge.

Sign up for the 30 day challenge and get your edge sharpened. Yes, that is an affiliate link and no I don’t promote any other product from this blog. This is too good not to promote. Also, you may be asking what’s the up sell, I mean nothing is really free. The deal is, the uber advanced high priest stuff, is offered after the 30 day challenge for a few pieces of Silver, which is up to you if you want to sign up. I did sign up for the advanced stuff and I implement some of it in my client business and it’s very, very tasty. But if you want to increase muscle mass with the free stuff, get stuck in/

Of course, if you are a competitor of mine. You are a very important and powerful and attractive person and do not need to bother with such stuff, your brain is so full of experience and link building goodness you would literally explode if you added to it. Nothing to see here, move along please.

This is my first affiliate product I have promoted here, and I would only ever promote something of exceptional value. If you are a crusty seo dude like myself, send your staff on it. But I would suggest you maybe want a little refresh, a small tune up. Even if it’s so you can say, “I knew that”, in between donuts.

I used them once, in Pizza Express, one was on the back of a menu and it gave me a business idea for a crowd sourced event. I scanned the scatty image and it sent me a recipe of classic pizza. Which is cool. Although I never looked at the recipes or use the QR codes since, even though I see them pop up like a rash on the hot, sweaty back of a Ginger in Ibiza.

What I do use the scanner for though is – and I hope no one from Waterstones is reading this – is checking out the books in Waterstones, scanning them with Red Laser and checking out the prices online. Mostly I download books by Kindle and If I could do it through the wifi at Waterstones (they don’t have wifi and neither does the Costa within the Waterstones) I would be willing to pay a few quid to have it there and then.

I like to have things as soon as I want them, strange how consumers are these days.

How much profit does Waterstones make on a £10 book, couple quid I assume. But if instead of selling the book it merely acted as a showroom for books then….

That is not the only use of Red Laser, it is also useful as a note taker of things you like to buy. It’s quite interesting to mooch around Tesco and Sainsbury’s scanning stuff. Well I find it interesting, but then I’m an uber geek.

So, should small business get excited about QR codes? Not yet. Soon though, as more and more, business will be conducted in this manner and although it’s fun, the masses have not yet adopted it. Much better to let first movers iron out the kinks and allow you to analyze what works and what does not.

Although, I quite like my idea using QR codes. I think I shall save it for Dragons Den.

Unfortunately I didn’t come up with it, Michelle McPherson did in this blog post with is replete with informational nibbly bits.

The post is good because it proposes simple solutions to a simple problem that people love to over complicate.

Hell is doing the same thing over and over again and failing and not learning and tweaking next time round to stop the madness.

You see it all the time online, I see it all the time online.

And that’s a good thing if you get it, because you can slip between the shadows and work it when others are still scratching their head wondering why they can’t fit in watching the complete Sopranos DVD boxset with online domination of the “Hamster Cage” niche.

It’s one reason I stopped reading SEO blogs.

Title tags? Really, what, put them in my web pages? Cool, thanks.

It’s not that SEO is dead, it’s just that you can learn 97% of all you need in 20 minutes. And if you then go on a 6 week course in how to crank out fancy reports you can make tons of cash as an SEO agency.

The reality is:

SEO is really link building

Linkbuilding is not about quality, it’s about scale.

Link building is not about scale, it’s about publishing actionable information.

You mean you have actionable information and you are not putting it on your website?

Are you an idiot?

You mean you own a carpet cleaning company and you didn’t publish an article about how much it would cost to clean the red carpet at the Royal Wedding and how many bottles of cleaning fluid you would need and wether or not you would youse a fine brush filter or a coarse one?

It’s not hard.

But you do have to think in a way that is antithetical to how you would build a carpet cleaning company.

Which is why linkbaiters get hired and why they never show you pictures of their office (it’s usually in a bit of a state).

If you have a website, you are a publisher, Do you think like a publisher? Do you know what a publisher thinks like. They think like Rupert Murdoch, Felix Dennis, Hugh Hefner. If they ran the content part of your website, what do you think would happen to the traffic?

Publishing on the web, is exactly the same as publishing on paper.

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

“Think you’re a salesman you sonofabitch?” (Points for naming the film)

It’s the same principles.

You have to go backwards, not forwards to win in this game.

If you think it’s about the latest tool, then you are the Tool. (not sure that translates but megh)

Go back about 4,000 years and you will find the first published list and it still gets talked about.

Truth is, lists work.

2nd Truth is, people moan about lists and yet for some mysterious reason still read them, share them, comment about them.

The human brain hasn’t simply changed into a new way of thinking since the Internet came along.

Sex

Death

Money

Power

Health

More sex

Things have not changed, the lizard brain is a hungry beast and will feed before any other part.

Stop being a clever arse and start being an actionable-information production machine.

Sometimes I wonder why people go nuts buying Adsense ads when there are far more effective ways to market your website. Showing me the same ad over and over makes little sense, especially when I am not interested in buying.

So it is with Dunster House Log Cabins. I include a bit of adsense here to see if it does pop up.

Of course, you may not be seeing the advert as it will be Geo targeted, plus if you are reading this in 2065, the advert may have stopped running. But I am sure you have seen certain adverts pop up again and again, as if someone spilt their coffee whilst pressing the buy button and missed a few decimal places.

Update:
Yes, the cabin ad came up, but looking at the ad from the front of the blog came up with something else. Interesting.

It’s the price of doing business that you have to wade through thigh high rivers of steaming….. before you get something that resonates, something that connects. Something that makes you blog and inspires you to write and freely give a bit of link love, which is of course is the essence of what linkbaiting is about.

There are two quotes in the blog post that underpins the article for me.

the less your media content looks like advertising, the more effective it will be as advertising.

How cool and zen like is that and how counter intuitive the way most marketing and business people think. Now I am not naive, the blog post that Mark wrote is 100% marketing, I am sure intention was to have people talk about it, link to it, pass it around.

It’s internal and external link structure follows best practice of bigging up your mates and business collegues without breaking the narrative flow, and providing sweeter than sweet anchor text.

It is a joy to experience such a well put together blog post and the fact that I found it connected on an emotional level is testament to the quality of the writing.

The second quote is,

If you really want to succeed online, it will take a lot of time. Let?s face it, if you want to succeed at anything worthwhile, it?s going to take a lot of time.

I realised a long time ago, if I practiced the guitar and hour a day for a year I would be OK. Which I did, but if I practiced it for an hour a day over ten years I would be excellent.

99 out of 100 are good.

But only 1 out of 100 are excellent.

Excellence cost 9 years.

These figures are illustrative of one element of becoming successful. The problem you may have is not one of giving up and failing, but one of getting bored, distracted and trying to do a million other things a the same time.

Don’t believe me? How many windows does your browser have open right now? I have two browsers open and over 30 windows open. Unnnngggg.

What I take from Mark’s blog post is to revisit the ass-achingly simple truths that must be burnt into the brain with a hot branding iron at regular intervals of the journey.

All this of course raises more questions than it answers, but that is what good teaching does.

The answer has to be, because search engines are not yet doing their job properly.

Is it possible to simply forget about seo and publish a website based on the natural ways a human being would organise information?

I think it is.

But it’s also possible for any system which interprets a naturally constructed web page to be tweaked and allow an enhanced page to rank higher than the natural page

Here’s another question. How much seo should a web designer know and use?

Why do we have an seo industry and not a web designer industry which uses seo techniques?

Is it because web designers are a bit thick?

…or is it more to do with that fact that an approach that a web page optimiser would take is totally different to that of a designer?

The different elements that make a web page/site popular take different ways of thinking. Different states of mind, hell different clothes even. If you get a mixed crowd of web designers, programmers and seos, you can invariably pick them out by what they are wearing and the amount of hair gel being used.

Social media marketers and linkbaiters are certainly no different.

The past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about how a lot of these web development and marketing disciplines all fit together in the most efficient way. My conclusion is that you have to be expert in an individual category and have a working knowledge all the other disciplines to make you own work towards the objective. The objective being a successful website.

Knowledge isn’t enough when attempting to get expert status, you have to do and fail before you can do and succeed. Only then can you understand the distance between failure and success and the resources you need to employ to gain success.

Effectively marketing a website in even a moderately competitive market these days needs a lot of resources. A lot of experts working together. Social media marketing and online networking needs a lot of resources and time and therefore is expensive.

The answer to “how much does it take to market a website?”

More expensive than it was 5 years ago and probably a lot cheaper than it will be in five years time.

Some links contain affiliate links, where I get paid a little bit of money if you buy. I only recommend products and services I have used and love.
It's a little bit of money and keeps me interested in creating more content here.
Free SEO Audit